Jennifer Adams doesn’t care what her kids’ school lacks. What matters is what it offers.

Missing from REACH Leadership STEAM Academy, a Riverside charter school, are picnic tables, a cafeteria, library and most playground equipment found at a typical elementary school. At REACH, kids play soccer and run on a dirt lot.

Housed at two churches because both are too small, the school focuses on science, technology, engineering, arts and math – subjects Adams wants her 9-year-old son, Jake, and 6-year-old daughter, Ginger, to master.

“My son is excelling, my daughter is excelling,” Adams said. “They’re getting a lot more academics and a lot more homework and they’re learning a lot more.”

The academy, which opened with 77 students in 2012, is trying to raise $1.5 million to add portables so it can have one location at Grace United Methodist Church in Riverside. Enrollment, now at 400, is growing by 100 students a year, founder and Executive Director Virgie Rentie said.

The school’s soaring popularity mirrors the explosion of charters – tuition-free public schools exempt from some state education rules – in the Inland area and across the nation.

Parents are seeking smaller classes and campuses, innovative teaching or specific programs such as arts, music or science. They find charter schools to be bargains with the feel of a private school.

RISING ENROLLMENT

The number of charter schools in Riverside and San Bernardino counties has boomed from 41 in 2009 to 64 this year. Enrollment in both counties has skyrocketed from 20,543 to 47,679 students during that span. California has 1,228 charter schools, more than any other state, serving 581,000 students. In 1992, the state approved charter schools to improve learning and foster creative teaching.

“Parents are seeking alternatives for their kids when traditional schools aren’t the right fit,” said Fátima Cristerna-Adame, Inland region director for the California Charter Schools Association. “They are looking to give their child the best opportunity they can.”

The growth notwithstanding, charter schools still comprise a small fraction of public school enrollment. Only 5 percent of public school students in Riverside County and 7 percent in San Bernardino County attend them. Statewide, the figure is 9 percent.

Charter schools increasingly have come under fire from teachers unions and other groups that view them as undermining traditional public education. A ballot initiative now in the signature-gathering phase would ban them in California. Supporters say these schools are draining dollars from regular public campuses, aren’t accountable to taxpayers and are seen as business ventures rather than just schools. They also accuse charter schools of fraud, segregation and discrimination by cherry picking students.

The measure gives charters the option of closing or converting to traditional public schools. If passed, the initiative would shift about $5 billion in state money from charter schools to school districts.

“These charter schools want to be quick and flexible, but sometimes it means they’re playing fast and loose with taxpayer dollars,” said Billy Valenzuela, Hemet Teachers Association president. He said he wasn’t familiar with the measure, which needs 365,880 signatures by Aug. 8 to quality for the November ballot.

“They’re great if they offer professional opportunities and innovative methods,” Valenzuela said. “But there’s a big caveat: Do they diminish the quality of instruction, do they adhere to accountability and transparency, do they give public records, do they discriminate?”

CHERRY PICKING STUDENTS?

By law, charter schools are open to all students and can’t discriminate in who they choose. When no seats are available – 158,000 students are on waiting lists in California – charter schools use a lottery to determine who gets in.

“That’s by far the No. 1 myth: That we can cherry pick students,” Cristerna-Adame said. “If we did, districts could shut us down almost immediately.”

Charter schools have similarities and differences with traditional public schools.

Unlike regular public schools, they can accept students regardless of where they live. Traditional public schools draw boundaries to determine which neighborhoods attend them.

Charters don’t have to abide by the same seismic standards, allowing them to operate in strip malls, churches, community centers and commercial buildings. Teachers, who must have credentials in core subjects including math and English, don’t belong to unions at most California charter schools, according to association data.

Like regular public schools, charter schools receive state dollars based on student attendance. They can tailor their curriculum to a specific focus such as performing arts, math, science or technology. Academic programs must align with the Common Core State Standards and students must take standardized tests.

They are subject to financial audits and have oversight from the agency that authorizes them, typically a local school district. Charter schools’ guiding document – called a petition – must be renewed, usually every five years. They can be closed for fiscal mismanagement, poor academic performance or breaking state education laws.

Inland charter schools have sometimes encountered resistance. Some operators have made sought approval several times and changed their applications before finally getting approved.

Baypoint Preparatory Academy in Hemet was turned down by the Hemet and Riverside County school boards before it appealed to the state Board of Education last year and won permission to open. Hemet rejected the proposal in part because administrators said the school appeared to be converting a private school into a public one, which is against the law. The campus is on the property of the former Cornerstone Christian School.

The county board rejected that argument, but denied the petition because of financial concerns and lack of a comprehensive education plan. The school addressed the concerns at the state level and was cleared to operate.

FAILED EFFORTS

Other charter schools haven’t succeeded in opening or expanding in Riverside County.

Options for Youth, which bills itself as focused on getting disconnected students back on the track to academic success, lost its bid to operate in Riverside in April. The school has 31 centers across Southern California including Moreno Valley, San Bernardino, Fontana and Rancho Cucamonga.

The Riverside Unified School District board unanimously rejected the school’s proposal, saying it lacked details on how it would serve special-education children, ensure the health and safety of students and how it would be run.

A local board must have specific reasons to deny a petition such an “unsound educational program” or a conviction that the school is “demonstrably unlikely” to succeed, the state’s education code states.

Riverside school board President Tom Hunt said that, in his eight years on the board, the district has approved two of the five applications it has reviewed.

“They seemed to be wanting to be the McDonald’s of charter schools and be in every area they can,” said Hunt, referring to the Options for Youth petition. “Their education plan wasn’t unique. There wasn’t anything we weren’t already offering.”

Options for Youth spokeswoman Kelli Ryder did not respond to requests for comment.

‘VERY LAX’

Hunt said he supports competition from charter schools because they make district schools better. But he wants state lawmakers to reform the system to raise pay for charter school teachers and require the same building standards.

“It’s very lax,” Hunt said. “The Legislature needs to implement some guidelines that put them on an even keel with us.”

The trend in Riverside County is for school districts to open their own charter schools that are run by their own boards and governed by the rules of the district while offering more flexibility and innovation. These schools don’t have to abide by district attendance boundaries.

“I think districts want to appear they are choice friendly,” said Cristerna-Adame, of the charter schools association. “It’s one way to attract families from out of the area to move into the district.”

About half the county’s charter schools are the non-independent ones run by school districts. The number of applications for new charters in the county has slowed recently as many operators stopped applying because they believe they won’t get a fair hearing, Cristerna-Adame said.

It’s a different story in San Bernardino County, she said. The San Bernardino City Unified School District board has heard about 15 new charter petitions this year, all of which were rejected for financial or other legitimate reasons, she said.

“I haven’t seen an unfair denial by San Bernardino City Unified this year,” she said.

An example of a district-run charter school is the Moreno Valley Community Learning Center, a mix of classroom and independent study aimed at helping kids who haven’t done well at traditional schools.

“They should have the same scrutiny and meet the same standards as any other public school or public school district,” he said.

The jury is still out as to whether charter schools outperform their traditional public school counterparts, said Cassandra Guarino, a professor of education and public Policy at UC Riverside.

Guarino said she and a colleague did a recent study that found no evidence that charter schools push out low-performing students. In some places such as Florida and Chicago, charter schools are preparing kids for college and successful careers, she said.

She added that, while charter schools are positive because they offer parents choice, they’re not always better.

“I don’t think it is a panacea or even the best available reform for closing achievement gaps and improving education for the disadvantaged,” Guarino said.

BUILDING BOOM

If there’s one charter that’s thrived in the Inland area, it’s River Springs Charter School.

Chartered by the Riverside County Office of Education in 2007, its enrollment has more than doubled from 2,000 to 5,370 students. It serves 14 locations, including Riverside, Temecula, Wildomar, Murrieta, Hemet and Corona. It also home-schools about 800 youths in San Bernardino County and runs a kindergarten through eighth-grade learning center in Rancho Cucamonga.

The Temecula-based school now plans to spend about $3 million to buy a three-story office building for its administrative headquarters on Jefferson Avenue in the city. It plans to move into some offices in the building this summer and the rest by 2018, Superintendent Kathleen Hermsmeyer said.

Rivers Springs also plans to open a new learning center on the site of a former YMCA building in Riverside.

The privately financed project is expected to cost a little less than $12 million and includes refurbishing and expanding the building with the goal of opening by January, she said.

The school strives to offer individual learning plans tailored to students’ interests. A first-grader who loves rockets will learn English, math, science, history and other subjects through activities related to that interest.

“Our children roll their sleeves up and are in the driver’s seat,” Hermsmeyer said. “We’re here to navigate and help them get there.”

At Riverside’s REACH, which stands for Reaching Excellence in Academics through Community and Home school partnerships, parents said their kids are challenged more than at other public schools. The curriculum includes Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

Smaller classes, one-on-one instruction and a longer school day allow more time for math, English, social studies, science and the arts, said Julie Sprowls, whose 7-year-old son, Noah, attends the school.

Jared Merril, who went to a traditional public school last year, said there’s no bullying and kids respect adults at REACH. He said he learned to add and subtract fractions, compare decimals to fractions, solve word problems and assemble a small electric motor in science.

“They teach harder stuff that strengthens your mind and helps you get to college,” said Jared, a 10-year-old fourth grader. “It’s my favorite school of all time.”

Stephen Wall has covered regional education issues and general assignment since 2013. An Orange County native, he lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the mid-1990s and is fluent in Spanish. He worked for The Sun from 1999 to 2010, writing about city government, schools, education, immigration and other topics. He joined The Press-Enterprise as a freelancer in 2013 and became a staff writer two years later. His hobbies include running and Angels baseball.